Posts Tagged ‘sema 2013’

As we prepare to cover the North American Auto Show in Detroit tomorrow, what better way to start the week off than with our gallery of booth professionals at SEMA from a couple of months ago. Stay tuned tomorrow for our full coverage right from Cobo Center in Detroit, Michigan. For now, enjoy our gallery of beautiful women in Vegas!

With SEMA wrapped up, it’s time to choose our favorite cars from the show. This year was tough to nail down the best of the best, as manufacturers as well as aftermarket companies went all out to produce some stunning vehicles. With that, let’s start!

Our first choice is the Slek Designs BMW Z4 Carbon Fiber. Dressed completely in Carbon Fiber body panels, the widebody Z4 looks menacing in person. VF Engineering provides the supercharger on this Z4 to give it the power it needs to match the looks.

There are a lot of wild and wacky builds at SEMA, but sometimes lost amongst all the fancy air brushed body work, super wide body kits and custom interiors are a nice set of wheels that these rides are sitting on. We focus our lenses on wheels in the wheel and tire hall and present to you, a closer look at (some of) the wheels of SEMA 2013.

There was a notable absence this year after last year’s SEMA show, and that is ADV.1 is missing. They opted not to do a booth after last year and went back to their old method of renting out a suite at a local hotel. Unfortunately SEMA does not allow this and the ADV.1 penthouse wheel display at the Cosmopolitan was shut down. On the ADV.1 facebook page there was no confirmation this is all true, just a giant black on red image that says “SEMA banned us. Oh Well.” that has since been removed.

Many of the bigger wheel companies were on hand as usual including all the Chinese wheel companies pushing their knockoffs.

SEMA is known for outrageous project cars but there’s a lot more going on than just crazy cars and no, I don’t mean all the hvac manufacturers, CNC machine operators, and LED light suppliers hiding out in the upper level of the south hall. I’m talking about bikes. We most certainly did not capture every bike at the show as there were simply too many to shoot but nevertheless, enjoy the gallery!

Front and Center inside the Mopar booth at SEMA 2013 was a pair of limited edition Dodge Challengers that were being debuted at the show. For 2014 the Mopar Limited Edition is circling back to the Challenger (In 2011 it was the Charger, then 2012 there was a Mopar ’12 300 and last year Mopar produced a Mopar ’13 Dart). The Mopar ’14 Challenger will be limited to a production run of only 100, making it the rarest Mopar Limited Edition and will be available only in Bright White or Gloss Black.

Mopar also revealed that the Shaker hood will return to the Challenger as a functional element:

“The legendary Shaker performance hood is back, with its engine-mounted, fully floating scoop and exposed high-flow element that produces cold-air induction – making the new 2014 Dodge Challenger R/T Shaker the real deal,” said Tim Kuniskis, President and CEO of Dodge Brand. “With Challenger having its best sales-year ever, the time is right to provide our most loyal fans with the return of the Shaker, and even more power with new ‘Scat Package,’ performance stage kits.”

The engine mounted, matte black sits above the hood drawing cool air into engine. The “Shaker” name comes from the fact that the air intake shakes or moves with movement of the engine. Dodge also announced that new Scat performance packages will be available on the Dart, Charger and Challenger models. A Challenger fitted with a Scat Performance package can be seen above.

We really thought about splitting this booth tour into two as the Ford booth was so large but in the end we decided to just keep the entire booth together. I’ll give a quick rundown of what I thought were some of the highlights of the Ford booth. I’m not a big truck guy but I’ve always liked the F-150, especially this slammed and supercharged one built by Hulst Customs for Fatal Clothing. Sitting on a set of 24″ custom fit DUB wheels, this truck is probably not very practical but damn does it look good!

Another truck that I thought was really awesome was the 1956 Ford F-100 named Snakebit presented by Gene Simmons and Shannon Tweed. It is powered by a supercharged 5.4L V8 that feeds over 550 horsepower to the 20″ rear wheels. Up front this truck rides on a set of 18″ wheels. The wheelbase of the F-100 has been stretched by about 5 inches.

The Toyota booth was an interesting one at SEMA. On one side of the booth you had a wide-body Toyota Corolla rally car that was ignored by most of the booth visitors even though it was one of the more unique cars. The other side, where all the people were busy holding up their phones and tablets (ugh!) snapping photos and videos, sat a Spongebob themed 2014 Toyota Highlander.

What stopped most people in their tracks was the giant aquarium that took up the entire rear of the Highlander. It was pretty well done and I suppose it was a bit more unique than the Corolla I just mentioned, but still, I felt bad for the ‘rolla.

In a booth packed with a bunch of brightly painted vehicles like the highlighter Hylighter yellow Veloster turbo or the mint green Fox Marketing turbo Veloster in the booth, you’d think it be hard to have a single vehicle stand out as the star but of course you’d be wrong.

Hyundai was showing off a turbo Genesis built by Bisimoto Engineering that had one stand out feature on the spec sheet, 1029 horsepower. I think I have used the word “beast” to describe many cars at SEMA but I think this one truly earns it! While typically the turbo 2.0L is the powerplant of choice for tuners, Bisimoto opted to go start with the 3.8L N/A motor. Throw in some Arias forged pistons, Golden Eagle sleeves, a beefier Magnafuel fuel pump, ARP studs, a custom built air-to-air intercooler based on spearco cores and a ton of other parts and I guess what comes out is over 1000 horsepower! :)

The Kia booth at SEMA 2013 reminded me a lot of their booth from last year as the vehicles had a very similar feel. Last year Kia had a super hero themed SEMA booth with vehicles from Kia’s entire model lineup including the Soul, Rio, Forte, and Optima.

This year was all about the Kia Soul. Just like last year, the booth was filled with over the top builds that show off the crazy custom fabrication work that tuners put into their vehicles. One particular Kia Soul was modified to be a mobile DJ station that was providing the tunes for the booth.

In addition to unveiling the all new 2014 Honda Civic Coupe, Honda had a lot to show off to the visitors of their booth at SEMA. Honda Performance Development (HPD), the racing arm of American Honda Motor Co. showed off its new range of HPD Street Performance products fitted to a couple vehicles in the booth. The Supercharged CR-Z pictured above features a near endless list of HPD parts including an air-to-air intercooler, high flow fuel injectors, air filters, sport exhaust, sport dampers, coilovers, enlarged brakes and 18″ wheels wrapped with Michelin Pilot Sport rubber.

They also had an HPD Honda Civic with a full street graffiti themed wrap. Modifications included the following parts from the HPD parts bin: a big brake kit, performance springs, 25.4mm rear anti-roll bar, 18″ wheels and a K24Z7 racing engine. This is a preview of some potential new street performance accessories that may be trickling down to consumers developed from HPD racing experience.